A trolley is a container for loading printed circuit board (PCB) components, and a trolley optimisation problem (TOP) is an assignment of PCB components to trolleys for use in the production of a set of PCBs in an assembly line. In this paper, we introduce the TOP, a novel operation research application. To formulate the TOP, we derive a novel extension of the bin packing problem. We exploit the problem structure to decompose the TOP into two smaller, identical, and independent problems. Further, we develop a mixed integer linear programming model to solve the TOP and prove that the TOP is an NP-complete problem. A case study of an aerospace manufacturing company is used to illustrate the TOP which successfully automated the manual process in the company and resulted in significant cost reductions and flexibility in the building process.

翻译：推车是一种用于装载印刷电路板（PCB）元件的容器，推车优化问题（TOP）是指将PCB元件分配给推车，以用于装配线上生产一组PCB。本文介绍了一种新颖的运筹学应用——TOP。为构建TOP模型，我们推导了装箱问题的一种新扩展形式。我们利用问题结构将TOP分解为两个更小、相同且独立的子问题。进一步，我们开发了一个混合整数线性规划模型来求解TOP，并证明TOP是一个NP完全问题。通过一家航空航天制造公司的案例研究来阐述TOP，该方案成功实现了公司手动流程的自动化，并显著降低了成本，提高了生产过程的灵活性。